Agora

[9thdoctor]

The film Agora has just been released on DVD, and I recommend it. I’m quite familiar with the history being depicted in this film, and it is unusually faithful to what’s recorded. The setting is Alexandria in the late 4th and early 5th century, and it concerns the philosopher/astronomer Hypatia, portrayed by Rachel Weisz. The violent conflicts between Christians, Jews, and pagans are dramatized, and I can’t think of another film where Christians are depicted so negatively. What Passion of the Christ was to Jews, this could be to Christians, except this is much more reliable historically.

The film clearly had a good budget, the crowd scenes are very impressive (and not CGI), but it didn’t get good distribution in US theatres. Netflix has it for rental.

Click to see spoilers:

It’ll be interesting, if enough OLers watch it, to discuss how the scientific method gets depicted in the film. Therein is the biggest whopper, they show Hypatia proving the heliocentric model, and concluding that the Earth’s orbit is elliptical, and it just doesn’t follow from the evidence. So be prepared to strain to maintain your disbelief suspension. Maybe HarriPei could tell us at what point she had a “green light to induction”, but I doubt it.

Other problems:

The film is basically in two parts, showing first the events leading up to the destruction of the Serapeum in 391, then part two shows the events leading up to Hypatia’s murder in 415. The ever visually appealing Rachel Weisz doesn’t appear to age between the two parts. The other characters do, however. I suppose it could be explained by a formula for miracle moisturizer, lost when the library was destroyed.

To cut to the chase, or rather, spoil the ending, history records that she was flayed to death by a mob of monks. The filmmakers switch it around a little, to spare us the sight. It works well enough.

From Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican:

Edited October 21, 2010 by Ninth Doctor

[Mike11]

Strange. Where are the picketers? The FOX Gang? The Papists?

[9thdoctor]

Strange. Where are the picketers? The FOX Gang? The Papists?

It didn’t get much US distribution, so I guess it flew under the radar. I’m sure there’s gossip on why that was, but I haven’t looked into it. I never had a chance to see it until now (it came out this week on DVD). It’s in English, but the filmmakers are Spanish, and it was the top grossing film in Spain in 2009. It’s not action packed like Gladiator, though it gets violent, still it was never going to be a huge hit like that. The violence doesn’t have that heroic quality; you probably won’t be rooting for either side or identifying with a sword swinging character. Also, the film’s quite intellectual, and there’s not much nudity or sex. Nevertheless, rent it, it’s great.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_%28film%29

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSTkMYECxX4

[BaalChatzaf]

I downloaded Agora from Amazon and watched it. It was a wonderful motion picture but it had historical inaccuracies. It had a "Hollywood ending". On the night before Hypatia is taken and murdered she figures out that the earth traces out an elliptical orbit around the Sun with the Sun at a focal point. She deduces this a priori. Wonderful drama, terrible history and worse science. Aristarchus who first proposed that the planets go around the Sun never considered orbits other than circles (ditto for Copernicus, who recreated Aristarchus' theory). Kepler started off that way, but could not make the ephemeris of Mars fit with a circular pattern. It took him 8 years (count them) of wresting with Tycho Brahes numbers before he curve fitted the data with an ellipse. There is no way in heaven or hell that Hypatia or any other Greek who was totally ignorant of inertia or the notion of momentum could have -deduced- that. Even Galileo never got away from circular orbits. That break through belongs to Johannes Kepler.

So I accepted the dramatic license taken to enhance the story line, but -Agora- should not, must not be taken as an accurate historical account of Hypatia's thinking.

The part where the Christian incited by Cyrill (later to become a saint) butcher hypatia seems to line up with all available historical data we have on the matter. The Christians were portrayed as bad-ass religious fanatics, as foul as Jihadi fanatics are today.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[9thdoctor]

I downloaded Agora from Amazon and watched it. It was a wonderful motion picture but it had historical inaccuracies. It had a "Hollywood ending". On the night before Hypatia is taken and murdered she figures out that the earth traces out an elliptical orbit around the Sun with the Sun at a focal point. She deduces this a priori. Wonderful drama, terrible history and worse science.

I would make the case that the history is extraordinarily accurate, however I take it you read the spoiler part of my original post where I called the astronomical discoveries the big whopper, and invoked HarriPei for guidance on when she got her “green light to induction”. Did you catch how she figured out that the orbit was elliptical? Knowing that the Earth’s orbit is barely elliptical (eccentricity of about .02, compared to Mercury's .2), there’s just no way, but you said it was a priori, and I beg to differ. She brings up the variation in the size of the sun at different times of year, and if she’d measured it (how?), and if the sun’s observed size didn’t vary for other reasons besides it’s distance from Earth…well never mind, by that point you just have to let it sweep you along. Remind me to explain how the TARDIS works one of these days.

As to it having a "Hollywood ending", you've got to be kidding. My idea of a Hollywood ending would be the heroine escaping, burying documents in the desert, and then they get discovered in the present day ala I, Claudius. A happy ending. Here we get the camera zooming out just as the really brutal bad ending, that we knew all along was coming, gets underway, with just a little merciful twist.

must not be taken as an accurate historical account of Hypatia's thinking

Agreed.

The Christians were portrayed as bad-ass religious fanatics, as foul as Jihadi fanatics are today.

Amen.

[BaalChatzaf]

I would make the case that the history is extraordinarily accurate, however I take it you read the spoiler part of my original post where I called the astronomical discoveries the big whopper, and invoked HarriPei for guidance on when she got her "green light to induction". Did you catch how she figured out that the orbit was elliptical? Knowing that the Earth's orbit is barely elliptical (eccentricity of about .02, compared to Mercury's .2), there's just no way, but you said it was a priori, and I beg to differ. She brings up the variation in the size of the sun at different times of year, and if she'd measured it (how?), and if the sun's observed size didn't vary for other reasons besides it's distance from Earth…well never mind, by that point you just have to let it sweep you along. Remind me to explain how the TARDIS works one of these days.

An off center circular orbit would explain the variation in sun size. What militates against circular orbits is the variation of speed of the earth around the Sun. Kepler, using Tycho's numbers (which took years to collect) and Kepler himself laboring eight years to try to fit circles to Tycho's ephemeris gave up. He got an ellipse as the best fist. Kepler law of equal areas only implies that there must be a centripital acceleration on Earth. Hypatia could not have gotten this for the following reasons:

1. She had no concept of inertia. She believed all motion must be the result of a force. The idea of inertia did not emerge until around 600 C.E. with John Philliponus. He was beginning to get a glimmer of inertia and momentum. None of the Greek philosophers grasped inertia. Not even Aristarchus.

2. Hypatia did not have the mathematics to do a fit to data such as could be gotten in her day. The Greeks did not have algebra or a decent system of arithmetic.

3. The two peg method of drawing an ellipse was not discovered until the 16th century. To prove that tracing a string bound to two pegs and pulled taught generates an ellipse one needs co-ordinate geometry. Not invented until the time of Descartes and Fermat.

The movie has Hypatia doing an experiment aboard ship which Galileo was the first to think of. Be aboard a smoothly sailing ship and drop a weight from high on a mast. It falls straight down, relative to the ship and lands at the foot of the mast. Hypatia was very unlikely to think of this, since she bought the Aristotelian version of motion. All the Greeks of that time did.

As I said, the science history of the movie was very inaccurate, but the movie was still very entertaining. Rachel Weisz was absolutely perfect for the part. She resembles drawings of Hypatia made Renaissance. She was wonderful. Also that scene where she dropped the menstrual rag was worth the price of the movie.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Mike11]

there’s not much nudity or sex.

Rachel Weisz can do more with one raised eyebrow than a hundred of those naked Hollywood harlots.

[BaalChatzaf]

Here is a small snippet about Hypatia from the Wiki Article on her:

A Neoplatonist philosopher, she belonged to the mathematical tradition of the Academy of Athens represented by Eudoxus of Cnidus;^[13] she followed the school of the 3rd century thinker Plotinus, discouraging empirical enquiry and encouraging logical and mathematical studies.^[14] The name Hypatia derives from the adjective ὑπάτη, the feminine form of ὕπατος (upatos), meaning "highest, uppermost, supremest".^[15][16]

It took another mathematician operating abstractly to show Kepler's Laws are coherent and consistent with the basic principles of mechanics, to with, Isaac Newton who showed that given the Law of Gravitation (the inverse square law) Kepler's three laws concerning elliptical orbits must follow. Again, it was not an inductive operation. It was the purest of mathematics at work (calculus and differential equations) which technique the Greeks never came close to developing (except for Archimedes, who was a modern as Tomorrow).

There is no way Hypatia could have been Kepler 1200 years before Kepler.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited October 23, 2010 by BaalChatzaf

[9thdoctor]

Rachel Weisz can do more with one raised eyebrow than a hundred of those naked Hollywood harlots.

In case you’re on the fence about renting it, she does lose her duds a couple times in the film.

Again, it was not an inductive operation. It was the purest of mathematics at work (calculus and differential equations) which technique the Greeks never came close to developing (except for Archimedes, who was a modern as Tomorrow).

I’m a little confused here, wasn’t Kepler’s work inductive? HarriPei hold him up as a paragon. I didn’t see her go beyond that.

[BaalChatzaf]

Rachel Weisz can do more with one raised eyebrow than a hundred of those naked Hollywood harlots.

In case you're on the fence about renting it, she does lose her duds a couple times in the film.

Again, it was not an inductive operation. It was the purest of mathematics at work (calculus and differential equations) which technique the Greeks never came close to developing (except for Archimedes, who was a modern as Tomorrow).

I'm a little confused here, wasn't Kepler's work inductive? HarriPei hold him up as a paragon. I didn't see her go beyond that.

To clarify. The Greeks were weak in inductive science. Their math was insufficient to deal with motion.

Kepler got his ellipses by curve fitting. He worked on the ephemeris that Tycho derived on Mars orbit. Tycho got his numbers the old fashioned way. He built the world's best naked eye astronomical instruments (good to two degrees) and he plotted the motions of the visible planets night after night, year after year. That was the material Kepler had to work with. Kepler initially attempted circular orbits but Mars remained stubbornly out of reach with an error of eight degrees. Kepler knew Tycho's instruments were good to two degrees, so Kepler manfully discarded circular orbits (which Galileo did not do) and soldiered on for eight long back breaking years until he got his fit using ellipses.

Newton showed why Kepler's empirical result holds, by deducing Kepler's 3 laws concerning elliptical orbits, their period and diameter from Newton's three laws of motions and the law of gravitation (the inverse square law).

Newton's three laws were the result of mathematical idealization and not laborious curve fitting as Kepler did with Tycho's numbers on the orbit of Mars. Newton invented mathematical physics. He replaced philosophical musings on motion with differential equations.

There is no way Hypatia or any Greek astronomer of the classical period could have reproduced Kepler's work. They did not have the math (in particular, algebra invented by the scholars in the Islamic domains) nor did they have mathematics equal to the problem of understanding motion. Even Archimedes dismissed the hypothesis of Aristarchus.

In the motion picture, Hypatia was shown deducing inertia (neither she nor any other Greek philosopher did) and in a fit of inspiration coming up (the night before she was to be killed) with elliptical orbits. Nonsense on stilts! There is simply no way Hypatia could have done that given what she and the other Greeks knew at the time.

Do not get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It was not historically correct in all its details. I enjoyed the way Christians were portrayed as being as bad-ass as Muslim fanatics are today. In one crowd scene the Christians are chanting - hallelulyah. It sounded suspiciously like Allah hu Akbar! Hmm....

Christianity at the time Rome collapsed was an intellectual disaster from which the West ultimately recuperated only with the help of Muslim and Jewish scholars who preserved and extended Greek science and mathematics.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited October 23, 2010 by BaalChatzaf

[Selene]

ND:

Agora is a new Spanish film, now in limited release in New York City and the Los Angeles area. At first glance, it might be mistaken for the sort of toga-and-sandals B-picture that was popular decades ago. But it’s much more than that. This is one ambitious and cerebral flick!

The setting of Agora is Fourth-Century Egypt under the Roman Empire. It tells the story of Hypatia, a real-life philosopher, against a background of clashes among Romans, Christians, and Jews.

http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/100614-hauptman-agora.php

Adam